Viral proteins, sorted by structure

Over the millennia, viruses have become excellent manipulators of biology. But there’s a lot that scientists don’t know about how viruses work. In a new study, scientists in Jennifer Doudna’s group at the Innovative Genomics Institute introduce a database of predicted structures of viral proteins, and use it to find the functions of previously mysterious proteins ( Nature 2024, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07809-y ). Researchers often learn something about the function of an unknown protein from related proteins with similar sequences. But tens of thousands of viral proteins show little or no sequence similarity to known proteins. Scientists have found that disparate sequences can sometimes fold into unexpectedly similar 3D structures. “Structures have the advantage over amino acids that they are conserved for much, much longer,” says Martin Steinegger, a computational biologist at Seoul National University who developed a tool for structure homology searching. Doudna lab postdoctoral researcher Jason Nomburg launched a